Dicraeosauridae is a family of relatively small, short-necked sauropods that lived from the Late Jurassic into the Early Cretaceous, roughly 154 to 100 million years ago. Unlike most of their long-necked relatives, dicraeosaurids had proportionally short necks and small skulls, along with tall, deeply forked (bifid) neural spines running down the neck and back that likely anchored a strong ligament system or supported a ridge of soft tissue. Body length in most species stayed under 12 meters, modest by sauropod standards, and their teeth were narrow and peg-like, suited to stripping foliage rather than heavy chewing.
The family is best known from Tendaguru in Tanzania, which produced the type genus Dicraeosaurus, and from the Morrison Formation of North America and the Cretaceous of Patagonia, which produced genera such as Suuwassea and Amargasaurus. Amargasaurus in particular is notable for an exaggerated double row of elongated neural spines along its neck, among the most distinctive skeletal profiles of any sauropod. The family's patchy but wide geographic spread, from Africa to South America, has been used to help reconstruct how sauropod lineages dispersed across the fragmenting continents of the Jurassic and Cretaceous.